12 posts from February 2008

February 28, 2008

1. The best comment on the temporary Starbucks closure, from The Onion. (And, by the way, now that they all seem to be using automatic machines, what is there to teach employees? Convincing yourself that a strawberry cream Frappuccino has anything to do with coffee?)

February 27, 2008

When you learn that the three college kids in an old Toyota Corolla are scouring this marginal neighborhood on a quest, you might think you've dropped into a dangerous narrative.

Then one of them, Serhii Chrucky, says, "There it is."

The driver, Jacob Kaplan, pulls over. Chrucky gets out. He's got a camera in hand, and he photographs, from several angles, an old street sign on the West Side.

Looking at it, you wouldn't think much of Chrucky's photographic subject, this rusty identifier of Oakley Boulevard, located just north of Lake Street. But it is, says Kaplan, a "remnant of when the boulevards were maintained by the Park District," and it will soon be featured on a Web site devoted to such urban vestiges, perhaps on the "Odd Signs" page.

Kaplan (on left in photo), Chrucky (right) and friend Corinne Aquino (center) spend quite a few Sundays and Mondays tooling around Chicago looking for hints of the city that was here before. The yellow-and-black street signs that were a Chicago trademark before the generic green-and-whites took over. The old brewery-owned "tied houses" -- bars that would sell you, say, a Schlitz and only a Schlitz. The "Fire Insurance Patrol" stations, from the days when the public fire department had a private counterpart.

[For a photo gallery of Forgotten Chicago's founders and some of its favorite city sites, go here.]

February 26, 2008

Within hours of the shootings at Northern Illinois University, Web searchers, working from a couple of details in a media account, had correctly identified the gunman as Steven Kazmierczak.

The assailant, who had not been officially identified at that time, was a former vice president of an NIU student organization, according to an article published on the Tribune's Web site after the Valentine's Day murders, and he had co-authored a scholarly paper on self-injury in prison.

It didn't take much work on the Internet to pin those two details to only one person: Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old from the Chicago suburbs who killed five and then himself in an NIU classroom in DeKalb.

Loren Coleman, a Maine author who has written books about suicide clusters and the "copycat effect" in mass killings, thinks the Web may play a bigger role than many people realize. He may have been the first to name Kazmierczak, at 2:59 a.m. Feb. 15, according to the time-stamp on his blog, well before authorities officially released the name.

But what he wrote next was, in a way, more telling.

"I expect an in-depth examination of Kazmierczak's visible Internet life within hours," Coleman wrote in the post on The Copycat Effect.

February 20, 2008

Tcho, a new, Web-centric chocolate company from San Francisco, has won an awful lot of attention considering that all it's doing is blending and packaging plain(ish) chocolate bars. That's probably because an investor is Louis Rossetto, a Wired magazine founder.

And because this is a moment in history when journalists are really interested in the question of what their next career might be.

And because it's, you know, chocolate.

Anyway, I ordered some Tcho via my browser, and the verdict on an early batch -- known, a little cloyingly, as "beta" -- is: very good and appealingly different. Made with beans from Ghana, the version labeled 0.21A has got a deep, almost roast coffee taste, heavy on the earth. The construction feels appealingly rustic: not quite chunky or grainy, but not all smoothed-out, either. And it definitely keeps the emphasis on the chocolate taste, rather than letting sugar take over, as even some very good dark chocolates seem to do.

It's a great flavor burst to satisfy the not-too-sweet tooth, with just one stamp-size square leaving a lasting impression.

But there's a problem with the Internet delivery system. The chocolate already costs $4 per 50-gram bar, about $36 per pound. Add the $5 flat-rate shipping, and you could pay up to $91 per pound if you bought just one bar.

Available only via the Web for now, the company plans to open a fancy showroom at its Fisherman's Wharf facility in San Francisco later this year.

Like Porsches never allowed to top 80 m.p.h., or, indeed, like desktop computers, our mobile devices often get to use only a small chunk of their potential. One quick way to unleash some of that power is to open them up as Internet scanners.

And one of the better tools I've seen for doing so -- for taking even a mediocre Internet service like my BlackBerry using T-Mobile's Edge network and making it pop -- is the FreeRange WebReader.

The application functions like an RSS feed, bringing fresh headlines from the Web sites you specify to your device. But it's better because it loads more quickly than the typical RSS feed. The FreeRange folk host headlines and story summaries on their own servers, meaning you don't have to wait for the (often slow) Web function on your device to go out and retrieve material from, say, Gawker or chicagotribune.com.

So now, instead of reading novels or dealing with e-mail while I ride the train or wait in line, I can read the latest posts from Ars Technica, ESPN.com or Reddit. And rather than me calling these sites up and waiting for downloads, they're all right there, waiting for me. When I want the full article, rather than just the summary, it opens up in a browser built into FreeRange, again streamlining the process.

You can e-mail article links directly from FreeRange, and you can also post items to your Del.icio.us account, a (highly recommended) Web-based site that stores your bookmarks.

Best of all: If you limit the sources you follow to 10, it's free.

From your mobile phone's browser, go here to install FreeRange. It works, in some cases in beta versions, with BlackBerrys, Palm Treos and Windows Mobile devices and a number of other phones (see freerangeinc.com).

February 19, 2008

Some phishing expeditions would be funny, if you didn't know that somewhere people are falling for them. The message below came to my work e-mail from "Microsoft.com," with a very enticing (and excited!) subject line:

February 13, 2008

The news last week that Google was ramping up a local news feature in its search engine probably put fear in the hearts of the many people already trying to bring local news to the computer screen.

But so far, at least, the likes of EveryBlock, Outside.in and Topix needn't panic. The Google feature misses the mark by a surprisingly wide measure. You're supposed to be able to type a town into the local search bar at news.google.com and get "a local section for any city, state or country in the world," according to the Google News Blog.

So how about "Oak Park, IL," an urban suburb of about 50,000 where the big news in the last week was the denial, finally, of lights for the high school football field?

To even start, you have to find the place to enter in your town or ZIP code. The Google blog doesn't explain it, but it's most of the way down the page at news.google.com, in a box marked "Local News."

1. Perhaps the surest sign that Facebook has arrived: Creator Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend were captured outside a restaurant by the cameras of Web and TV gossipmongers TMZ. It's also a sign that TMZ desperately needs a real celebrity to fall off the wagon.

2. On their MySpace page, a new band, Previously on Lost, offers recaps of the previous week's episodes of the confounding ABC series in song form. I've listened to the first two tunes and, unfortunately, rhyming doesn't make things any clearer.

3. HarperCollins will try making a handful of the books it publishes available for free viewing -- but not downloading or printing -- online. This is almost as revolutionary as a technology known as "the library."

4. Half of British men surveyed said they would give up sex for six months in exchange for a 50-inch TV. And 97 percent of their partners, when told of the offer, said, "Deal."

5. This spring, Starbucks will finally start offering free Wi-Fi in its stores, under certain conditions. You have to be an AT&T broadband customer, use Starbucks prepaid cash cards or be able to complete your online session in the time it takes a group of teenagers to order frappuccinos.

February 07, 2008

The Transportation Security Administration, the people behind the 3-ounce shampoo bottle and the mandatory pre-boarding sock display, now has a blog. It's called "Evolution of Security."

As you might expect, this is not one of your freewheeling Internet blogs. Here is an advance copy I've discovered of the soon-to-be-propagated Rules of the TSA Blog:

1. Commenters must arrive at the blog 45 minutes before attempting to post a comment.

2. Comments cannot last more than three paragraphs.

3. Comments that are longer than three paragraphs are subject to confiscation. For more on the handling of comments, see our post, "Why 1-Quart Zip-Loc Bags are Much More Secure than 1-Gallon Zip-Loc Bags."

4. The use of the term "evolution" in the blog's title does not constitute endorsement by the TSA or this administration of the concept of evolution, generally. TSA believes it may well be possible that airport security is the result of Intelligent Design.

5. Readers of the TSA blog get to participate in our random pre-travel screening exercise. Roughly one blogger in a hundred will have his computer "pulled aside" and thoroughly checked for interest in Islamic charities, liquid explosives, "progressive" online political organizations, etc.

6. Regular blog visitors will be eligible for "rewards points" to be used at our new e-commerce site, Shampoo N' Stuff (www.shampoonstuff.gov). All proceeds will offset the cost of providing American air passengers with the best security in the United States.

7. Our blog's subtitle, "Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part," is meant to sound scary. On a scale of 1, "Garfield" scary, to 5, "Psycho" scary, tell us how we are doing.

8. If you're on our blog because you are bothered by the shoe-removal rule, please see our post titled "Shoes." As it explains, there is more to this policy than a reaction to "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. Did you know that in Japanese households, shoes are routinely removed before entering?

9. The rule about no lithium batteries in checked bags is not TSA's rule. To complain about that, please visit the FAA's blog. Oh, that's right. The FAA doesn't have a blog. Which agency do you like better now?

10. Please, no more posts about whether you can carry your "Swiss Army knife" on board. If you must know, we have intelligence suggesting "Swiss Army" may be the name of a vast, underground network of people with an unhealthy interest in multiply destructive devices.

11. The TSA appreciates the enthusiastic and colorful comments we have received thus far. We thank you for those -- such vivid language! -- and mention, only because the rules of evidence say we must, that excessive interest in our blog is viewed as prima facie evidence of potential terrorist ties.

12. Thank you for visiting the TSA blog. Happy traveling, on the Web or in the skies!

It is early in the morning in a Clybourn corridor office, but for John McIntyre, one of the least likely looking Internet entrepreneurs you'll encounter, it's already midday.

He's been at his desk since about 4 a.m., sifting through enough news about the American electoral process to make a less politically inclined person ponder the benefits of dictatorship.

"Everything's pretty horse-race focused right now," says McIntyre, flipping through the 20 or so open windows on his computer desktop, "especially today, when there's a big election."

It's the day of the Florida presidential primary, significant for the Republicans, and significant for Real Clear Politics, the Web site McIntyre and partner Tom Bevan founded in 2000 that has grown to a staff of a couple dozen, a partnership with Forbes and a prominent place in the national political discussion.

McIntyre, who more closely resembles the former Chicago options trader he is than a Silicon Valley code-writing wunderkind, and Bevan, who is in Florida writing and reporting, built it to this point by doing precisely what he has been doing virtually every day for almost eight years running: setting alarms, getting up before daylight, and serving as air traffic controllers for all the reporting, opinion and polls that fly across the Web.